Category Archives: art my Grandpa loved

January 18, 2018 · 4:32 pm

The Doctor’s Bill Comes Due

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I am in the middle of a family health meltdown. In this time when the yearly flu epidemic is turning deadly, my two kids living at home and still in high school are both home sick. And I am finding it difficult to pay for illnesses. My recent trip to the hospital for a faux heart attack has left me staring down an incoming tidal wave of doctor and hospital bills. I have been paying more for health insurance than ever before. The lovely caring government has been mucking about with health care issues to the point that, even though I am paying thousands of dollars more per year for health insurance than I did ten years ago, I have huge medical bills that, due to higher deductables, leave more for me to pay as my portion than ever before. I am paying twice as much for a three day stay in the hospital than I did five years ago when I had pneumonia, and was hospitalized for five days. The Princess’s doctor visit yesterday cost me $77 dollars. Number two son goes to the doctor this afternoon, and I have to hope it won’t cost more than that, because I am running out of Uber money for the month.

Gone are the days when I could afford to be sick. Now, bankrupt and with no credit left to my name, I am going further into the dark lake of debt, hoping for the mercy of lawyers and credit collection agencies. They may as well grind my bones to make their bread. I have little else to give them.

If this sounds like a complaint rather than the humor I usually shoot for, well, that’s because that’s what it is. I am sick and tired of always being sick and tired. But I have to do my part to help the American economy. It is really booming right now. Probably because people like me are investing so much in health care, right before we die because we can’t afford to pay for the medicine the doctor prescribes.

My thanks go out to the ghost of Norman Rockwell for providing the illustrations for this post. The pictures make me long for the good old days when doctors actually cared, and weren’t just making lots of money. Of course, it isn’t the doctors who are making most of the money off piratical health-insurance schemes. Whoever those people are, we never actually see their faces, and the voices we argue with over the insurance help lines are just their employees. Anyway, I am not myself sick yet. That probably comes later. So I will hunker down and burrow my way through a potentially terrible week.

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Filed under angry rant, art my Grandpa loved, artists I admire, artwork, feeling sorry for myself, health, humor, illness, pessimism

Tagged as doctors, Norman Rockwell

June 28, 2017 · 4:35 am

Dawn in Iowa, Sunset in Texas

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The recent Iowa trip has been more or less a metaphor for my life as a whole. I don’t mean to be funny but… wait just a minute! Yes I do. This is corn-shucking humor blog, after all! But the metaphor is still there. I was born in Iowa.

Dawn broke over the farm yesterday where Uncle Harry used to live with his wife, Aunt Jean, and their three kids, Karen, Bob, and Tom. Bob was in my class at school. We got into a fight once over who should be Robin Hood when we were playing with all the cousins in the old brooder house on Grandpa Aldrich’s farm, the farm where mom and dad now live. It was a fight that got so intense that we were throwing broke flower-pot shards at each other in anger. Bob’s hand got cut so badly that he had to go to Belmond and get stitches. Dang, was I in trouble after that. Bob’s version, the shard I threw hit him right in the hand, directly between his thumb and pointer finger and cut him. My version, he cut himself as he threw a pot shard at me, and it cut him leaving his hand. Everyone believed Bob, of course. I’m the nutty kid that always told the stories that gave the girls nightmares. And those stories were never true… mostly. So they couldn’t believe my version.

Mom and my sister Nancy designed and executed the painted barn quilt on the work shed that used to be the chicken house.

Bucolic farm scene to represent my Iowegian past.

But life, like days and car trips, moves on. We had to pack up the little Ford Escort that brought me home and take off once more for Texas. I was a little bit worried about the dog. She didn’t poop as much in Iowa as she normally does in Texas. Well, we figured that out on the way back. She pooped a lot of funny colors at every rest-stop dog park on the way back to Texas because of all the people food she had eaten. She got fed better in Iowa apparently. And it was stuff like stolen Doritos and other stuff that is so not-good-for-her.

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But going back to Texas with two kids and a dog is a lot like me after college, moving to Texas via Trailways bus in order to become a teacher. I got a job in Cotulla, Texas, the place where LBJ taught way back when he was a young Texan and still working at being good at telling the REALLY BIG LIES. I think I mentioned this before, but all the kids in the painting above were real kids I taught in my first year teaching (except for the kid sleeping.,, nobody did anything but hop around and yell at me my first year as a teacher… including the principal). Oh, and the window is imaginary. I taught for three years in a windowless concrete box with only buzzing fluorescent lights to keep the monsters from killing and eating me… or each other. Within a decade of that first class, two of the boys had been to prison, three were already dead, and one became a star lineman for the Texas A&M football team.

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And over time I got closer and closer to my goal. My skills became bigger and better as a teacher. I grew in wisdom and power. Honestly, the grass in the picture was closer to the camera than I was, so I am looming in the sky above the photographer, not tiny and smaller than the grass. So maybe I better claim the picture was taken by fairies. Yeah, that’s it. Down there in the grass. Iowegian fairies got a hold of my camera and took the picture. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. (See. I never really learned to get away with the REALLY BIG LIES. A teacher, as a storyteller, has to also be a truth-teller.)

fulldance So we returned to Texas, and that is probably where the sunset of my life will take place. I am retired from teaching now. I am blogging and telling lies instead… well, writing fiction. I should have another book published soon. And it has fairies in it. So maybe there is still time to pull off the REALLY BIG LIES.

A $3.00 Treasure Trove

If you cruise the bargain sections in an old used book store like Half-Price Books, eventually you are going to find something priceless. This book I am showing you is that very thing for me.

It was copyrighted in 1978. The inscription inside the front cover says this was a Father’s Day gift on June 19th, 1988. Someone named Gary gifted it to someone named Claude in Burleson, Texas. It was probably a cherished book until someone passed away and the book changed hands in an estate sale.

Howard Pyle

The book chronicles the height of the publishing era when being able to print books and reproduce artworks began entertaining the masses. Always before painters and great artists worked for a patron for the purpose of decorating their home in a way that displayed their great wealth. But from the 1880’s to the rise of cinema, magazines and books kept the masses entertained, helped more people to become literate than ever before, and created the stories that made our shared culture and life experiences grow stronger and ever more inventive. The book focuses on the best of the best among a new breed of artist… the illustrators.

These are the ones the book details;

Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Frederick Remington, Maxfield Parrish, J.C. Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell, Charles Dana Gibson, Howard Chandler Christy, James Montgomery Flagg, and John Held Jr.

N.C. Wyeth

Wyeth was most famous as a book illustrator for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, other books by Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and a famous volume of tales about Robin Hood.

Frederick Remington

Remington is a name you probably know as a maker of Western art. He was a famous painter of cowboys and Indians and the American frontier.

Maxfield Parrish

Maxfield Parrish is my all-time favorite painter. His work is something I gushed about in previous posts because I own other books about his fanciful works painted in Maxfield Parrish blue.

Also Maxfield Parrish

J.C. Leyendecker

You will probably recognize Leyendecker’s work in magazine and advertising illustration as the standard of the Roaring 20’s. His paintings set a style that swept American culture for more than a decade, and still affects how we dress to this very day.

More Leyendecker

Even more from Leyendecker

Norman Rockwell

Norman Rockwell and his work for The Saturday Evening Post is still familiar to practically everyone who reads and looks at the illustrations. As you can see he was a master of folksy realism and could do a portrait better than practically anyone.

Also Rockwell

I have also written about Norman Rockwell before too. I have half a dozen books that include his works. My wife is from the Philippines and she knew about him before I ever said a word to her about him.

Charles Dana Gibson

As you can plainly see, Gibson was a master of pen and ink. His work for Collier’s and other magazines thrills in simple black and white. More cartoonists than just little ol’ me obsess about how he did what he did.

Also Gibson

James Montgomery Flagg… with a name like that, who else could it be?

John Held Jr.

The work of Held is stylistically different than all the rest in easily noticeable ways. He’s the guy that made all the big-headed Pinocchio-looking people in the 1920’s. You may have seen his work before, though you probably never knew his name.

This bit of someone else’s treasure hoard will now become a part of my own dragon’s treasure, staying by my bedside for quite a while, while I continue to suck the marrow from each of its bones. I love this book. It is mine, and you can’t have it… unless you find your own copy in a used bookstore somewhere.

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Filed under art criticism, art my Grandpa loved, book reports, book review, humor, illustrations, imagination, oil painting, old art, old books, pen and ink, Uncategorized

Tagged as art my grandfather loved, illustrators, old books, used book stores

September 4, 2016 · 5:22 pm

Goodbye, Sweet Gene

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I’m going to miss him. I’m really going to miss him. I know he suffered from Alzheimer’s and hadn’t really done anything new and exciting in a while, but still, I always knew that he was still there. He was still Gene Wilder. Not only that, he was still Willy Wonka, still the Waco Kid from Blazing Saddles, still Dr. Frankenstein from Young Frankenstein, which he not only starred in, but wrote.

He was also Gilda Radner’s husband. The great love of his life, gone too as a victim of cancer back in 1989.

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The first time I ever saw him on screen was in college, in film class. We watched Mel Brooks’ The Producers on the classroom projector.

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We studied the movie in class as evidence that comedy films are difficult to make, but have a potential to be truly great film achievements. That same year, both Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein hit the big screens in Ames, Iowa. I saw and loved them both. Of course, I had watched the televised version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory on Grandma Beyer’s color TV sometime before that.

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Gene Wilder helped me see that I could live in a world of pure imagination. And that I could be whatever I truly wished to be.

https://youtu.be/r2pt2-F2j2g

I’m definitely going to miss that man.

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Filed under art my Grandpa loved, artists I admire, feeling sorry for myself, finding love, humor, movie review

Tagged as Gene Wilder, humor, tribute, Willy Wonka

July 24, 2016 · 1:32 pm

The Clock on the Wall

Who in their right mind writes an essay about a clock on the wall? Well, the “right mind” thing gives me an out. I do watch the clock on the wall. Especially now that I am old, and the sand in the hour glass is running out. The clock on the wall can be quite entertaining. Especially one like the cuckoo clock that hangs in my parents’ front entryway. On the hour, the dancers twirl and the two goofballs in lederhosen saw away at the log they will never be able to cut in two.

My wife and I gave that clock to my parents as a gift for their 50th wedding anniversary. We bought it in Texas and brought it on a visit back to the family farm in Iowa. Having old German relatives as a boy, I remember waiting impatiently for the clock to strike in Great Aunt Selma’s house, anxious to see the cuckoo pop out and the clockwork entertainment do its little mechanical show. I’d have gladly wished on a star for the hours to pass instantly… to see the show again right away… and be older and wiser and able to do more. Back then it seemed like older folks like Aunt Selma lived forever, with her dried-apple face and German accent. Accumulated time seemed to have majesty and power. It was magical.

But now I am old. My joints hurt every time I move. I can’t get out of bed of a morning easily. Parts of me that I used to take for granted no longer work. I have forgotten what it feels like to feel good and full of energy. The time on the face of this old clock hasn’t changed in nearly a decade. My parents don’t keep it wound. We no longer look forward to the clock-Kinder dancing so often. If the clock stays forever at five after four, maybe the grim reaper won’t come knock at the door.

I have always believed that there was magic in old cuckoo clocks. It was a simple, earnest faith in magic that only a child can truly know. But now, as an old man, I remember.

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Filed under art my Grandpa loved, autobiography, commentary, family, feeling sorry for myself, humor, metaphor, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as clock magic, German cuckoo clocks, humor, magic, memory, metaphors for life, time passing

April 9, 2016 · 4:17 pm

The Lovely Lennon Sisters

Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich lived on the family farm outside of town, a little more than two miles from the tiny farm town of Rowan, Iowa. I walked it more than once. It was faster to walk the railroad tracks between the two places. About a mile and three quarters as the crow flies… three hours as the boy investigates the critters in the weeds, throws rocks at dragonflies, and listens to the birdsong along the way. But the point is, my maternal grandparents lived close enough to have a profound influence on my young life. Much of what they loved became what I love. And every Saturday night, they loved to watch the Lawrence Welk Show. And that show had highlights that we longed to see again and again… on a show that never really went into reruns. We lived to see Jo Ann Castle play the old rinky-tink piano, Bobby and Cissy doing a dance routine, and most of all… the lovely Lennon Sisters.

http://www.welkmusicalfamily.com/welkcomepage.html

I always wanted to be the things they wished me to be in the song “May You Always”. I wanted to “walk in sunshine” and “live with laughter”. They presented a world of possibilities all clean and good and wholesome. As a young boy who hated girls, I had a secret crush on Janet Lennon who was the youngest, though a decade older than me, and on Peggy Lennon, the one with the exotic Asian eyes. They sang to me and spoke directly to my heart.

You have to believe in something when you are young. The world can present you with so many dark and hurtful experiences, that you simply have to have something to hang onto and keep you from being blighted and crippled by the pain. For me, it often came in the form of a lovely and simple lyric sung by the lovely Lennon Sisters. When you are faced with hard choices… especially in those dark moments when you think about ending it all because it is all just too much to bear, the things stored in those special pockets of your heart are the only things that can save you. For me, one of those things will always be the music of the Lennon Sisters… especially when watched on the old black and white TV in the farmhouse where my grandparents lived, and helped to raise me, every Saturday night in the 1960’s.

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Filed under art my Grandpa loved, battling depression, Celebration, humor, inspiration, nostalgia, strange and wonderful ideas about life, TV review

Tagged as humor, Lawrence Welk, Lennon Sisters, musical memories, nostalgia, values education

January 17, 2016 · 8:12 pm

Big Eyes

141202210752_margaret_keane_304x171_margaretkeane Yesterday, before the big game, I watched the DVD I bought of Tim Burton’s Golden Globe Award movie, Big Eyes. It is the true-story bio-pic of an artist I loved as a kid, Margaret Keane… though I knew her as Walter Keane.

This movie is the bizarre real-life tale of an artist whose art was stolen from her by a man she loved, and supposedly loved her back. I have to wonder how you deal with a thing like that as an artist? I live in obscurity as an artist. My art has been published in several venues, but I have never been paid a dime for it. All I have ever gotten is publication in return for “exposure”, and limited exposure at that. But my art always brought vigor, joy, and light to my career as a school teacher. My art was always my own, and had either my own name on it, or the name Mickey on it. I shared my drawing skill in ways that directly impacted the lives of other people. It enriched my “teacher life”.

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Mrs. Keane’s hauntingly beautiful big-eyed children appealed to the cartoonist in me. They expressed such deeply-felt character and emotion, that I was obsessed with imitating them. In fact, the “big-eye-ness” of them can still be detected in some of my work. I remember wondering how these children, mostly girls, could be drawn by a grown man. What was his obsession with little girls? But the true story reveals that he was a man so desperate to have art talent and notoriety that he put his name on his wife’s work, made her paint in secret, and eventually convinced himself that it was actually his. He had a real genius for marketing art, and he invented many of the art-market ploys that would later inform the careers of homely artists like Paul Detlafsen and Thomas Kinkaid. One wonders if Mrs. Keane could’ve ever become famous and popular without him.

The movie itself is a Tim Burton masterpiece that reveals the artist that lives within the filmmaker himself. I love Burton’s movies for their visual mastery and artistic atmosphere. They are all very different in look and feel. Batman was very dark and Gothic, inventing an entirely new way of seeing Batman that differed remarkably from the 60’s TV series. Edward Scissorhands was full of muted, pastel colors and gentle humor. Alice in Wonderland was full of bright colors and oddly distorted fantasy characters. Dark Shadows was Gothic melodrama in 70’s pop-art style. This movie was true to the paintings that inspired it and visually saturate it. It is beautiful and colorful, while also serious and somber. It makes you contemplate the tears in the eyes of the big-eyed waifs in so many of the pictures. It is a movie “I love with a love that is more than a love in this kingdom by the sea”… if I may get all obsessive like Edgar Allen Poe.

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So, there you have it. Not so much a movie review as an effusion of love and admiration for an artist’s entire life and work. I am captivated… fascinated… addicted… all the things I always feel about works of great art.

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Filed under art my Grandpa loved, artists I admire, artwork, movie review

Tagged as artwork, big eyes, Margaret Keane, movie review, Tim Burton

February 19, 2015 · 2:06 pm

People All Have Worth

I know that you are probably immediately listing all the reasons that my title is totally wacky monkey-thinking in your head. And if you want to lay into me in the comments, you are more than welcome. But the reality is that teachers have to develop the mindset that all kids can learn and all people have value… no matter what. That can be hard to accept when you factor in how corrupted, warped, and badly-taught so many people have turned out to be. It honestly seems, sometimes, that when faced with the facts of how people act… being violent, or greedy, self-centered, thoughtless, un-caring, and willfully stupid… that they really don’t even have value to others if you kill them, let them rot, and try to use them as fertilizer. The plants you fertilize with that stuff will come up deformed.

But the Doctor I have pictured here, the Second Doctor played by Patrick Troughton always seemed to find Earth people delightful. Alien people too, for that matter, unless they were soulless mobile hate receptacles in robotic trash cans like the Daleks, or mindless machines powered by stolen human brains like the Cybermen. There is, indeed, music in every soul, even if some of it is a little bit discordant and awkward. And people are not born evil. The classic study done on Brazilian street kids showed that even with no resources to share and living empty, hopeless lives, the children helped one another, comforted one another, and refused to exploit one another. As a teacher you get to know every type that there is. And there are stupid kids (deprived of essential resources necessary to learning), and evil kids (lashing out at others for the pain inflicted upon them), and needy kids (who can never get enough of anything you might offer and always demand more, MORE, MORE!) Sometimes they drive you insane and make you want to resign and leave the country to go count penguins in Antarctica. But the Doctor is right. No matter what has been done to them, if you get to know them, and treat them as individual people rather than as problems… they are delightful!

So let me show you a few old drawings of people.

Cute people like Andrew here.

Or possibly stupid and goofy people who never get things right.

Or long-dead people who made their contributions long ago, and sacrificed everything to make our lives different… if not better.

Or young people who live and learn and hopefully love…

And try really hard at whatever they do… whether they have talent or not.

And hope and dream and play and laugh…

And sometimes hate… (but hopefully not too much)…

And can probably tell that I really like to draw people…

Because God made them all for a reason…

even if we will never find out what that reason is.

Toonerville, a Place I Once Lived In

There is a place so like the place where my heart and mind were born that I feel as if I have always lived there. That place is a cartoon panel that ran in newspapers throughout the country from 1913 to 1955 (a year before I was born in Mason City, Iowa). It was called Toonerville Folks and was centered around the famous Toonerville Trolley.

Fontaine Fox was born near Louisville Kentucky in 1884. Louisville, of course is one of the two cities that claims to be the inspiration for Toonerville. Apparently the old Brook Street Line Trolley in Louisville was always run-down, operating on balls of twine and bailing wire for repair parts. The people of Pelham, New York, however, point to a trolley ride Fox took in 1909 on Pelham’s rickety little trolley car with a highly enterprising and gossip-dealing old reprobate for a conductor. No matter which it was, Fox’s cartoon mastery took over and created Toonerville, where you find the famous trolley that “meets all trains”.

I didn’t learn of the comic strip’s existence until I was in college, but once I found it (yes, I am the type of idiot who researches old comics in university libraries), I couldn’t get enough of it. Characters like the Conductor, the Powerful (physically) Katrinka, and the terrible-tempered Mr. Bang can charm the neck hair off of any Midwestern farm-town boy who is too stupid to regret being born in the boring old rural Midwest.

I fancied myself to be just like the infamous Mickey (himself) McGuire. After all, we have the same first name… and I always lick any bully or boob who wants to put up a fight (at least in my daydreams).

So, this is my tribute to the cartoonist who probably did more to warp my personality and make me funny (well, at least easy to laugh at! ) than any other influence. All of the cartoons in this post can be credited to Fontaine Fox. And all the people in them can be blamed on Toonerville, the town I used to live in, though I never really knew it until far too late.

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Filed under art my Grandpa loved, artists I admire, cartoons, Toonerville

Tagged as art criticism, artwork, cartoons, Fontaine Fox, humor, Toonerville, Trolley

December 14, 2014 · 8:59 pm

Homely Art – Part Two – Paul Detlefsen

Back in about 1968 my Grandma Beyer was seriously scandalized by an artist named Paul Detlefsen. Detlefsen did a lot of covers for the “Ideals Magazine” that Grandma always had on her coffee tables. He scandalized her by putting a painting on the cover that showed a young boy taking his pants off, the rear view only, so he could go skinny dipping with a group of naked boys. Truthfully the picture shown above is by Detelfsen, but it is not the one that offended her. I have discovered that this painter of old-timey things like blacksmith shops and one-room school houses has painted at least four different versions of “the Old Swimmin’ Hole”. And Grandma was easily scandalized when we were kids. She was a very conservative woman who loved Ronald Reagan and his politics most severely and thought that Richard Nixon was a leftist radical. She didn’t like for people to be naked, except for bath time, and maybe not even then. She is one of the main reasons, along with this painter whom she adored, that I came to learn later in life that “naked is funny”. http://www.freeplaypost.com/PaulDetlefsen_VintageArtPrint_A.htm

Grandma Beyer also seriously loved puzzles, and besides “Ideals” covers, Paul Detlefsen did a beaucoup of jigsaw puzzles. (Beaucoup means a lot in Texican, I tend to think in Iowegian and talk in Texican and completely forget about the need to translate for those people who don’t know those two foreign tongues) One of the puzzles we spent hours working on was “Horse and Buggy Days” that I pictured here. They were the kind of puzzle paintings where every boy was Tom Sawyer and every girl was Becky Thatcher. And there were a lot of them. Here is another;

http://www.bigredtoybox.com/cgi-bin/toynfo.pl?detlefsenindex

Grandma had this in puzzle form also. We put the puzzle together, glued it to tag board, and framed it. It has hung on the wall in a Grandparent’s house, first Grandma Beyer’s and then Grandma Aldrich’s, since the early 1970’s. My own parents now live in Grandma Aldrich’s house, and that puzzle-painting may be hanging in an upstairs bedroom to this very day. Detlefsen is not known as a great artist. He was a humble painter who painted backdrops for films for over 20 years. In the 1950’s he switched gears and started doing lithographs that were turned into calendars, jigsaw puzzles, laminated table mats, playing cards, and reproductions you could buy in the Ben Franklin Dime Store in Belmond, Iowa and hang on your back porch at home. I believe I saw his paintings in all these forms in one place or another. According to Wikipedia (I know, research, right?) “In 1969, UPI estimated that his artwork had been seen by 80 per cent of all Americans.” That is pretty dang good for a humble painter, better numbers than Pablo Picasso ever saw. Let me share a few more of his works, and see if you recognize any of these;